A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  Charlie greeted me with his customary “Hey,” a quick throaty bark he somehow manages to work some warmth into. He immediately dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the plywood with his boot. I’ve told him maybe a half-dozen times his smoking doesn’t bother me, and anyway the “room” we were standing in was wide open to the weather, but Charlie likes to think of himself as someone who’s quit, so he allows himself to smoke only in the car or outdoors, and then only when alone. This was an accommodation that seemed very much in character, especially in the way it carefully layered an intricate regime of self-discipline over the absence of that very quality. In Charlie the supreme self-control and orderliness I associate with architects seems to be at constant logger-heads with deeper forces and appetites that he is too much a creature of the senses to master completely.

  It is a contest that is perhaps most openly waged in his attire, which despite his best efforts invariably puts you in mind of a hastily made bed. This morning, for example, Charlie had on under his suede jacket a very sharp new J. Crew shirt, but already it was climbing up out of his chinos, which were themselves riding alarmingly low. The man’s rumpledness is so deep-seated it would probably defeat Armani, assuming Charlie could afford such tailoring; he’s just too baggy and lumbering a guy. He’s also too much of a Yankee: Charlie’s the kind of New Englander (he grew up in Cambridge, in a family of Quakers that came to Massachusetts in 1650) for whom the absolute worst thing you can say about someone, or something, is that it’s pretentious.

  Not that this makes him the least bit careless about his presentation; to the contrary, Charlie has the architect’s clichéd self-consciousness about image and sensitivity to detail; it’s just that he’s loathe to come across that way. In fact he considers it a high compliment whenever a client tells him he doesn’t seem like an architect, since what people usually mean by this is that he listens well, is practical-minded, and prizes comfort as much as beauty. (Comf’table, pronounced in a cushy three-syllable version, is a favorite word; so is neat, deployed strictly as a superlative.) And, anyway, with two hundred hirsute pounds distributed somewhat unevenly over a six-foot frame, and a face of unusual sympathy and expressiveness—it’s animated by a footloose pair of shrubby eyebrows that almost touch in the middle—Charlie doesn’t look the part. But though the tail of his shirt may be on the loose, marching across his breast pocket you will invariably find a serried rank of pens and markers, their arrangement as fixed as the stars. I once asked him how his little system worked. “System?” he stammered. “You’ve got the wrong architect!” Yet after the gentlest prod he spelled it out in detail: “So, okay, the felt-tip here in first position? That’s a Stylist, for taking notes during meetings. Next up’s the black Expresso Bold, for rough schematic drawings, your basic big picture stuff, followed by the colored marker—usually red, but sometimes green—which I use to indicate clients’ changes on working drawings. And last but not least, the classic black Uniball fine-point, which is reserved exclusively for drafting.” Inside a very human exterior lurks the soul of an architect struggling to get out.

  It eventually became clear that, on this particular morning, the architect was in fact out and about. Charlie seemed pleased with the new room and its windows, but I could tell that something in this picture was bugging him. When I asked him what it was, he tried to demur, but his eyebrows had started to dance. One of the errors in Charlie’s self-conception is that he’s extremely good at hiding his feelings.

  I pressed, and he pointed out the window at the view.

  Looking out the bedroom window, you could follow the informal axis along which our garden had developed, as we gradually extended a slender finger of civilization from the back door out into what Judith had taken to calling the Wilderness: the irrepressible second-growth forest and scrub that was steadily marching down the hillside, threatening to engulf what was left of the farm and the little house. At ground level, from the old first-floor windows, this narrow corridor of grass with its adjoining beds of flowers, its rose arbor and fieldstone walls, had seemed a genuine accomplishment. But from here our hard-won path out into the land seemed more tenuous and paltry than I’d remembered it, and I guessed this was what was troubling Charlie about the view. The axis was all but lost in the big, turbulent landscape framed by the new window, expiring abruptly just past the arbor, which now seemed a few short steps from the back door. A nice pie of meadow was now visible in the distance, part way up the hillside, but the path held out no hope of ever reaching it. Suddenly it looked pointless. The elevated view Charlie had created had diminished the scope of the garden, and with it the reassuring marks of our presence in this landscape. We were back where we’d started more than a decade ago, the little house cowering behind its moat of lawn, struggling to fend off the advancing forest.

  What the garden’s axis needed now, the architect had concluded, was a destination—some sort of distinct object in the distance that would draw your eye out into the land and up the hill, somehow tie the cultivated foreground into the larger landscape above. I could sort of see his point, but it seemed to me this particular problem belonged down near the very bottom of a to-do list that had grown dauntingly tall. Judith and I were still camped out at my parents’.

  “So you mean like a bench or something?”

  “That would help. Absolutely. But I’ve got a neater idea.” He looked at me and grinned slightly, trying to gauge my appetite for neat new ideas, the last set not having yet been completely digested or paid for. “What I think we need to do is build something out there,” he began, extending an index finger through the rough opening and wagging it in the general direction of the meadow. “I haven’t figured out exactly what yet, but I think—in fact I know—that a little structure somewhere out there could really, really work. You need to think about it.”

  Just then I doubt there was anything I wanted to think about less. The prospect of embarking on any new construction project was so far out of the question as to be laughable. Our contractor was running four months behind schedule, he’d just admitted that he had no idea where to find the “neat” postage-stamp-size windows Charlie had spec’d for the gable ends, or how in the world he was ever going to bend a four-by-four piece of lumber to form the porch’s “neat” curving lintels. Our savings had been cleaned out, and we were about to return to the bank for a second mortgage. The very last thing we needed now was another neat idea from Charlie.

  I decided the best thing to do was just to let the suggestion lie, even after Charlie, warming to his plan, offered to design the new building free of charge. I didn’t know whether to regard this as an act of generosity from a friend or a particularly flagrant case of the monomania to which members of his profession seem to be prone. The odd thing about it was, I had never thought of Charlie that way. Compared to the Ayn Rand stereotype of the architect as a power-mad empire builder, a chilly figure at home only in the realm of his own ideal forms, Charlie had always seemed to me a fairly contented citizen of the real world, somebody with a deep appreciation for life as it is really lived, in all its unplatonic messiness. Yet here he was, actually suggesting that what the view from the window of his new building needed most of all was another Charlie Myer building.

  I thanked him for the generous offer and promptly changed the subject to something compelling, like plumbing fixtures.

  But I guess the notion had been planted, because many months later, when my thoughts turned to a room of my own, I found it was from the bedroom window that I invariably imagined it. Eventually I constructed a fairly detailed little daydream about the place, in which I followed myself walking down the garden path on a dewy summer morning with a cup of coffee in my hand, stepping under the rose arbor, ambling up the hill into the woods, and eventually coming upon my hut, which was planted somewhere far enough from the road that the world outside its door faded to rumor. What did the hut look like? The particulars were indistinct, except that the building seemed more woodsy than the house. It
was shingled rather than clapboarded, for example, and had a steeply sloped gable roof.

  Rehearsing this scenario in bed late one night, during one of the frequent bouts of sleeplessness I credited to incipient fatherhood, it occurred to me that my image of the building was based at least partly on a tree house I’d had as a child, growing up on Long Island—the last time I’d had a room of my own off in the woods. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a tree house, since there were no trees involved in its construction, at least not living ones. It was more like a little cape on stilts, a gable-roofed room maybe ten feet by six, and raised five feet off the ground on four pressure-treated posts. My father had hired a contractor named Goeltz to build it for me. Together they’d knocked off the design from a picture of a fancy playhouse my father and I had admired in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.

  The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.

  Not that I’m complaining, because it was due solely to his confirmed unhandiness that I ended up with the fanciest tree house in the development, one that boasted a pair of shuttered windows, a pine-plank floor, and a shingled roof. But the very best thing about my tree house (and the thing about it that, as a parent now myself, I find most astounding) was that no one but a kid could possibly gain admittance to it: the only way in was by climbing up a flimsy rope ladder and squeezing through a trapdoor in the floor that couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches square. As much as the tree house itself, the tiny trapdoor was a gift of extraordinary generosity: my parents had underwritten my dream of a place from which even they would be excluded.

  Arguably this was a foolish thing for them to do, because later on the tree house would serve as the setting for various illicit activities. Though even then, it all seemed something less than authentically depraved—a matter of symbolism mainly, not that that was unimportant. Paging through a Playboy or smoking pot up in the tree house, the point was in many ways less sexual or pharmacological than sacramental, odd as that might sound. For this was high childhood ritual, and more than anything else, it was the tree house itself that these ceremonies commemorated, this airborne room of my own, which I came to regard as a temple of my privacy and independence.

  Even more than adults do, children seem instinctively to grasp the deepest meanings of houseness—the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs. Shelter, for example, is a concept that nothing could underline as emphatically as a hail of well-thrown rocks. When I read Beowulf in college, all those vivid scenes of the mead hall under siege from Grendel made me think of those first thrilling nights my friends and I spent sleeping out in the new tree house, withstanding the predawn assaults of our enemies. Our local Grendel was an older boy named Jeff Grabel, who took it upon himself to terrorize us for reasons that were never articulated, but which we spent hours speculating about. The prevailing theory held that the dispute was territorial, since the tree house had been built in the middle of the half-acre wood that separated his family’s house from mine. Though this property technically belonged to my family, Grabel had had the run of it before the construction of the tree house, so it made sense he would have regarded our outpost as an alien incursion. For more than a year he dedicated his every effort to erasing our presence from the woods while we, with a matching tenacity, dedicated ours to preserving a toehold.

  “Every child begins the world again,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, and it’s certainly true that the games of boys can be almost cartoonishly atavistic, dredging up from who-knows-where the primordial struggles of the race. Between Grabel and me the cause was nothing less than that of chaos against civilization, Grendel against the mead hall, the Sioux against the settler. (The first time I had occasion to meet Jeff Grabel off the field of battle, years later, I was surprised to find he could form an English sentence; during raids he had whooped exclusively.) The symbol of civilization we’d set out to defend was my little stilt-house in the woods, four walls and a gable roof, its archetypal form signifying home, settlement, and in the context of that forest, defiance. The hearth around which we gathered after dark was a flashlight, whose beam reflecting down off the ceiling held us in a warm circle of light. For mead we had cans of Hawaiian Punch. And outside all around us chaos raged.

  Grabel and his allies chucked stones that would thud against the wood walls of the tree house with enough force to rock it on its posts. We would retaliate with water balloons, frequently delivered by catapult. Usually we felt fairly safe up there in the trees, the house’s windows shuttered against the hail of stones, but Grabel could keep it up all night, and sometimes we’d begin to feel trapped. Climbing down out of the tree house before dawn for any reason was out of the question. And this was occasionally a problem, as when one of us had to pee during the night. At first we relied on the equivalent of a bedpan, but this did not accord with the warrior image we were cultivating, so eventually we devised a more satisfactory solution: a curved length of black plastic pipe slipped through a knothole in the wall. The beauty of this appliance was that it could double as a weapon: its range and trajectory were adjustable to some degree, and we could hear Grabel scramble for cover whenever the long black snout emerged from its slot.

  The tree house was always at its best under siege, creaking in the wind, its posts bending slightly, the better to withstand the blows. Bachelard says that this is a property of houses in general, that they only come into their own in bad weather, when the poetry of shelter receives its fullest expression. A house under siege from the elements becomes “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos,” he writes. “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.”

  That was at night. During the day Grabel slept (or went to elementary school), and the significance of the tree house shifted. Instead of serving as a battleground, the building became a safer, more solitary, and dreamier place, my rural retreat from the cares of the big ranch house where, nominally, I lived with my three sisters, two parents, and numberless pets. Yet the tree house was in fact not the first such retreat I’d had. Even this room had its precursors, though these were strictly ad hoc and sited within the walls of my parent’s house. I’m thinking of the huts a child builds with an appliance carton, or two chairs and a blanket, or of one particular closet I cleared of coats and outfitted (with dials and gauges drawn in Magic Marker) to resemble a Gemini capsule. (NASA’s ingenious, high-tech envelopes of space have probably inflected my notion of the ideal room since the first time I watched Jules Bergman fold himself into one on television.) Lori, the oldest of my sisters, kept house for a time in another closet directly beneath the basement stairs, which gave the space a steeply sloped roof, lending it the feel of a cottage. Though these huts were firmly held in the embrace of our parent’s house, they formed another interior deep inside it, a second, more comprehensible frontier of inside and out, private and public, self and world, that we children could control.

  Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is the only book I’ve ever read that takes these sorts of places seriously, analyzing them—or at least our memories and dreams of them—as a way to understand our deepest, most subjective experience of place. He suggests that our sense of space is organized around two distinct poles, or tropisms: one attracting us to the vertical (compelling us to
seek the power and rationality of the tower view) and the other to the enclosed center, what he sometimes calls the “hut dream.” It is this second, centripetal attractor that inspires the child to build imaginary huts under tabletops and deep inside coat closets, and draws the adult toward the hearth or the kitchen table, places of maximum refuge that hold us in a small, concentrated circle of warmth. These, in Bachelard’s terms, are huts too.

  Of course Bachelard, a Frenchman, is describing a European’s sense of space, and an American—especially an American with childhood memories of a tree house and a quasi-adult dream of building a hut in the woods—can’t help but wonder if maybe we experience space somewhat differently in this country. For in addition to the centripetal impulse that Bachelard so tenderly describes—our wish to be “enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house”—isn’t there also a centrifugal impulse at work in the American dream of houses, one that is always pushing us outward, flinging open windows and reaching out into the surrounding landscape?

  One of the all-time great American houses—and one that no doubt stands behind any American’s wish for a room of one’s own—exhibits exactly this quality, at least in its author/architect/builder’s description of it. At Walden, after procrastinating for most of the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau finally built a hearth in time for winter, but he always seems much less enamored of his house’s sense of enclosure than of its unusual transparency. He delights every time a sparrow or a field mouse manages to infiltrate his cabin, which appears to have been no great feat. Thoreau waited until the freezing weather of November before he plastered the interior, so much did he enjoy the free passage of wind and sunlight through the knotholes and chinks in his walls.